by Mark Tufo
BT was at the bottom of the stairs with everything I had asked for. I looked over to him.
“Man, I just got down here,” he told me.
“The exercise will do you good, it looks like you’ve been hitting the MRE oatmeal cookies a little hard lately.”
“Fuck you, Mike.” He turned and went back upstairs to check on the status of the gunmen.
“I love you too, man.” I told him. “And stay low, the damn snipers are still out there.”
“Yeah, mom,” he told me.
“We’re waiting!” Chaz yelled impatiently.
“You can wait another minute,” I said under my breath. Or maybe not, I thought as I looked behind me at Adam. He was about as pale as I once figured vampires were; I now knew that wasn’t the case, but just last year that was what I thought. Adam’s breathing was shallow and anything less than a world class hospital wasn’t going to do him much good.
“BT says everything is good to go,” Angel yelled down the stairs. “He also said you were an asshole.”
“Angel!” her brother Ryan shouted.
“Well that’s what he said,” she defended herself. It kept going, but the door upstairs closed and the rest was lost to me.
I grabbed my rifle and took a long look at Adam. I wasn’t completely sure, but his dilated pupils gave me the impression he was no longer focusing on anything on this plane of existence. In fact, they were so wide, they looked like the last thing he had witnessed had scared the shit out of him. I wondered if that would be the last expression I would have when the Dark One came to claim me. Wait…could he claim me? I had no soul to lose? If I made it through the rest of the day I was going to grab some beers and think on that for a little while.
I made sure I was ready to fire and opened the door. Five men peered intently back at me, it was easy to determine who Chaz was by the worried expression on his face.
“All of you turn around,” I told them.
“See! I fucking told you he was going to kill us!”
“I’m going to check for weapons, I’ve been burned by the honor system before,” I told them.
BT was again in the basement. “Can you cover me?” I asked him.
“You want me to do anything else? Maybe get you a glass of water, shine your shoes, do a little tap dance?”
I looked over at him questioningly.
“Sorry, little amped up. Go ahead, I’ll cover you.”
“Gee thanks,” I told him as I put my rifle up against the house. I checked Chaz first; except for a fingernail clipper he was clean as a whistle. The second man had an ankle pistol and a Bowie knife, the third had two grenades shoved in his front pants pockets, I was wondering if he thought I might think these were his balls and just leave them alone. The fourth was also clean, the fifth had a sawed off shotgun shoved down his pants.
“You’re kidding right?” I asked. He shrugged. “Take it out nice and slow, please.”
I jumped when his gun went off. Dumb ass had wrapped his hand around the trigger, when he pulled up he fired, neatly obliterating the front part of his right front from his body. He toppled face first not even attempting to break his own fall. I could hear Gary’s retching from above us.
“Whatever you do, Gary, don’t raise your head over the railing to puke!” I warned him. Brown bile began to leak through the floorboards above and slightly behind us.
“So fruggin gross,” Gary said around a mouthful of semi-digested lunch; and it was. The man’s boot had ripped in two at the top, tendons and muscles had curled up and over the exposed skin, blood drained out so quickly it was easy to see the delicate smashed white bones underneath it all.
“Don’t worry, man, you can hold on to the gun,” I told the fallen man.
He was grunting in misery. It was better than shrieks…but not by much.
“Can I get my brother now?” Chaz asked.
“One more thing,” I said as I put the barrel of the second man’s ankle pistol to his head. I ripped his chain off as I did all the rest excluding the now Shoeless Joe Jackson. “Get him,” I said, stepping to the side. “Just you, though,” I said when two of the others turned.
Chaz ran in to the house, his cry of agony came immediately. “He’s dead!”
“He is?…now get him out of the house. And the other two, hell get them all out of here, including Stubby.”
“What do you want us to do with them?” Steel Balls asked.
“Drag them over to the pit, I don’t care.”
“But...but you took our vials.”
“I left Adam’s and Stubby’s on. You guys can fight for them, grab a body and get off my land.”
“Mike?” BT asked.
“No room here for mercy, buddy.”
“Mike?”
“BT, if we had a jail…maybe. Try to hold on to the reason why they were here.”
“You’re killing us,” Steel Balls, said as he hefted the man Chaz had shot.
“I’m doing no more or no less than you would have done to us,” I told him.
The other man went over and helped Stubby get up. Chaz was still in the basement rocking his brother back and forth in his lap.
The other men including one of their dead were heading across the yard. They were looking at the zombies that were eyeing them back. I wondered how large the sphere of influence for the vial would be. If they got into a tight enough huddle, it should protect the three of them.
I went into the house and dragged the other three dead men out of the house as BT covered me. Their blood had mostly stopped leaking, but I still left a trail a blind man could follow.
The man that had been shot through the head was the worst, dropping bits of brain matter of the floor. I tried to imagine it as something different, but I was staring straight at his head as I pulled him from his arms.
Two of the men were coming back to gather their dead, Stubby was sitting alone, the dead man was now burning in the kerosene at the bottom of the trench, black smoke was wafting up from his burning clothes and hair. The zombie congregation packed a little tighter where Stubby was sitting, either he looked delicious or they really liked smoked meat. A few were jostled into the trench below.
“Let’s go,” I told Chaz when I got the last man out.
His eyes were red-rimmed. “He’s all I’ve got left.”
“Yeah, and all those people you were going to kill upstairs, they’re all I’ve got left. Get out.”
He did without any further words, hefting his brother up over his shoulder. He brushed by as he left. Within a few more minutes all of the dead raiders were now permanent fixtures with the ground. The men were looking at the gap and the zombies, trying to figure out how they were going to get back across. BT and I watched as one of them actually turned and began to come back. I raised my rifle up and he turned back to the zombies.
Steel Balls and the man who had turned around began to talk rapidly, their voices rising to a peak. It looked like Steel Balls won. I could see Stubby begging, his hands were up in the air, he was shaking his head back and forth and trying to scoot back as fast as he could. Steel kicked Stubby in his bad foot. Stubby stopped moving immediately as his scream of pain pierced the silence. He paid no attention as Steel Balls moved and grabbed the chain off his neck.
“Help me, please!” Stubby begged.
I went back inside; BT stayed out a moment longer before joining me. I grabbed a bucket and some water out of the utility closet and had already started cleaning up stains that would never vanish.
“What happened out there, man?” BT asked me.
I looked up from my scrubbing. “What would you have done differently?”
“At least I would have left them the vials,” BT said, rubbing his face with his hands like he was trying to scour away the grime of the event.
“I’m going to walk you through my thoughts.”
“Go on,” he said, pulling up a folding chair that I did not think was up to the task of holding him suspended in space
.
“They weren’t here to borrow sugar, BT.”
“I get that, Mike, I do, but that’s cold-blooded.”
“I’m not done.” BT motioned for me to continue. “I let them leave intact, they go right back to Eliza, regroup and try again. She’s not just going to pat them on the shoulders and say, ‘Nice try fellas’. Maybe we stop them again, maybe we don’t. I’m not willing to gamble the lives of those people upstairs at all, no matter how good the odds may seem in our favor. Money is gambled, not lives. Now, as an added bonus, we have seven more vials of Eliza’s brew that we can give to people upstairs. Because when our perimeter is overrun…which it will be…”
BT’s eyes got wide.
“When the zombies get to the house, seven more people upstairs will now have a chance to blend in and maybe get the fuck away from this death house. Seven more of the people we love were just given an extra chance to hold on. And if the dip wads outside had played their cards right, I’m pretty sure the two vials would have been enough to protect all of them. Sure, they would have to know each other a little better than they may have wanted to, but they would have survived. And already they’re turning on each other. I doubt two of them make it back. They’re killing each other. They would have had no problem killing us. I say fuck ‘em, you should, too,” I told him as I got back to scooping brain and scrubbing blood.
The folding chair sighed in relief as BT heaved himself to his feet. He squeezed my shoulder as he went by. “Is there another sponge?” he asked, pointing to the utility room.
“Enough to make it through the apocalypse.”
“I hope so.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
The Backyard
“What now?” Xander, the silent one of the remaining three live men said as they stared across the abyss.
“Well, near as I can tell,” Steve, aka Steel Balls, began, “we have two vials and three people, and since I’m holding one and so is Chaz, it looks like you’re odd man out.”
“That’s not right, man, if we stay together we can make it,” Xander complained.
“Not a chance,” Steve said as he jumped the gap. The zombies in the front row could not yield fast enough as Steve struck chest to chest. He bounced back, grabbing onto the zombie’s tattered shirt pulling them both back into the pit.
He pulled the zombie to the side in a desperate attempt to avoid the deadly steel spikes. It worked to a point as a barb cleaved him on the left side of his abdomen. His hand clenching the vial opened to brace his body to stop any further damage. The zombie came straight down flush on the spike; it broke through his sternum and impaled him completely. The duo were locked head to foot, and without the vial to protect him, the zombie unaffected from the damage to his mid-section began to feed.
Steve started to pull frantically, his muscle and skin stretching violently as he tried to rip himself away sideways from the spike before the zombie could break through the denim pants he wore. “Xander, help me, man,” Steve asked frantically.
He was crying out loud as he tried to sever through three inches of his being. The zombie was making short work of the heavy material. Steve was kicking his leg so that the zombie could not seek purchase; he was losing the battle. Steve’s skin split with a wet rip from the pole just as the zombie took a small ribbon of meat from his calf.
“Oh fuck, man!” he yelled as he scrambled to get away from the zombie. One hand was clenched over the wound in his side. The kerosene fire below was threatening to ignite his shoes and the zombies at the top, beginning to realize he was fair game, started to walk into the fire to get at him.
“Xander, Chaz, please help me,” he begged.
Chaz was lost in the depths of his mourning and barely cognizant of the happenings in front of him. Xander had come to the conclusion that if Steve started to burn he wouldn’t even piss on him.
“Come on,” Xander said to Chaz as he led the brother away and to the other side of the yard where the steel framing to the foot bridge still remained. Steve screamed out four more times before either the fire or the zombies devoured him.
Xander made sure he had a handful of Chaz’ shirt at all times as he led the man out of the zombies. The zombies pressed tightly as they passed, sometimes not yielding their spot even after Xander walked into them. He kept his head down thinking that somehow, by not making eye contact, he would not illicit a challenge. The zombies were within tongue range almost constantly and Xander had enough wet marks to prove that they were tasting the validity of the food. He was happy they weren’t like sharks that bit first to determine taste.
Xander almost cried in relief when they made it through the brunt of the zombies and were stopped by a guard.
“Oh thank God,” he said nearly collapsing.
“What happened to the rest of you guys?” the guard asked.
“Dead,” was his one word reply.
“Holy shit, come on follow me. Kong gave us all orders that if any of you stumbled back to come and meet him personally without the woman.” Nobody wanted to use Eliza’s name, as if to speak it was to invoke her presence. And nobody wanted that cold beauty next to them. “Tell Kong I’ve got two coming,” the guard said, speaking into a small two-way radio.
“Roger that, bring them out to Dowboin road and have them wait,” the man on the other end said.
“Chaz, man, you alright?” the guard asked.
“I need to bury my brother,” he answered through a mourning haze.
“We will, man, we will. You want some help carrying him?” the guard asked.
“It’s just for a little while longer I can do it,” Chaz said.
It was another ten minutes through their circuitous route that the men found themselves on the roadway that led into the Talbot compound.
Kong was waiting impatiently. “You can go back to your post,” he told the guard. “What happened?” he asked when the guard was out of range.
“We never had a chance,” Xander said. “They were waiting for us. Killed the first four through the door including Chaz’ brother before we even knew what was going on.”
“And the rest of you?” Kong asked.
“Chaz made us put down our weapons when the guy inside, Mike I think his name was, said that if he wanted to keep his brother alive that’s what we had to do. Chaz shot Ned when he didn’t want to. So when all of our guns were gone, he takes our vials except for Pete’s and Adam’s. Pete shot most of his foot off when he tried to hide his gun and Steve pushed him into the trench, so that he could take his vial.”
“What a cluster fuck, where is Steve?”
“He fell into the pit, a few zombies ate him.”
“Christ on a cracker! What the fuck am I going to tell Eliza? She’ll want me to assemble another team. The men already think this Mike guy is supernatural.”
“He is,” Xander replied.
“What?” Kong asked.
“I’m telling you, man, there’s something different about this guy, he’s not normal. He was just in a gun battle and was as cool as a cucumber. Eliza is as mean as a rattlesnake, he is the rattlesnake. Why are we here Kong? What is it about this guy she hates so much? I think I deserve to know,” Xander said.
“Deserve? You’re better off not knowing,” Kong told him.
“I think we earned the right to know,” Chaz said, standing up from where he had laid his brother down. “Is the bitch even human?”
“I’m telling you, Chaz, you’re better off just leaving it alone,” Kong told him, trying to placate the other man.
“We’ve loaded trailers full of zombies and hauled them close to a thousand miles to fight a guy that has wiped out two insertion teams and killed my brother and you’re telling me to mind my own business? Well fuck you, Kong!” Chaz shouted.
Kong punched the man so hard in the side of the temple, Chaz’ legs locked up before he pitched over. “You got a problem with that?” Kong asked Xander.
Xander was backing up holding his hands in fr
ont of him. “No, man.”
“Get him up and help him bury his brother,” Kong said as he turned to relay the bad news to the one really in charge.
“There’s something else, Kong,” Xander said. “The zombies…they’re acting weird. Yeah I know, but even weirder for zombies. There’s a seven- or eight-foot deep trench, and it’s lined with spikes and fire it’s pretty nasty business. The zombies they won’t even try to get over it. They’re just standing there.”
“Are they looking down the trench?” Kong asked.
“No, that’s the thing, I don’t think they give two shits about the trench. They’re every one of them looking up at the house like they’re under a spell or something. It’s fucking creepy. The ones outside the fence keep moving in, then they stop. I noticed it when we were going in, and especially when we were leaving, because we were trying to get around them.”
***
“I expected to have Michael’s head by now,” Eliza said.
Most people would say that as a euphemism, Kong knew she meant it literally. “The team is back.”
“And yet I see none of the Talbots,” Eliza said, looking around with an exaggerated swing of her head.
“Only two of them made it back,” he told her hopelessly, hoping that would appease her.
“Did they exact any type of revenge for their losses?” Eliza asked.
“No,” Kong answered honestly.
“Perhaps some of the Talbots were mortally wounded?” Eliza asked.
“No, Eliza.”
“So twelve of your finest men were slaughtered and it appears that Michael has not so much as suffered a stubbed toe?” she asked, more of a smile showing on her lips than her normal sneer.
“It would appear that way,” he told her, wishing that right now he was anywhere except here. He would gladly even go back to 2005 and relive the worst day of his life over if it would help him escape this hell. He had been living in Connecticut with his wife of seven years—Madeline. He had just accepted a long distance haul to bring components to a Californian firm in Silicon Valley. The pay was something the couple could not refuse, although, being away from home for ten days was not sitting well with him. Leaves blew around his yard on the blustery fall day, his wife blew him a kiss and he pulled out of the driveway.
